NFS vs FTP

[andycheah]

Hello,

I have an assignment question for my networking class and it askes which is faster...NFS or FTP? It specifically to compare for large or small files. I cannot seem to find anything on the net about transfer speeds so I was hoping to find the answer here. I guess it really depends on the system setup and so on as well. I'm just looking for a general answer though. Stupid question.

I will reference anyone who responds in my assignment!

Thanks, Andy

 

[Electrode]

I have not actually used NFS before, but since the NFS protocol is a bit more complex than FTP, I'd imagine that FTP would be faster. Not significantly faster, but faster nonetheless.

 

[BDawg]

When you install any other sort of transfer method, samba, nfs, netatalk, they always say your speeds should be comparable, but less than ftp.

 

[alrox]

They are two different things with two different goals in mind, the question is flawed and doesn't give you any real world background into the situation. NFS is usually UDP, but most daemons can be ran in TCP mode too. Since there are less(no) ack's with UDP, there would be less communication from the client to the server. Of course, this all varies by speed of the machine speed, disks, connection type, etc. On a normal 100mbit/full duplex lan they would both pull roughly the same speeds. I'm sure whatever the answer your teacher gives will be wrong or leave out facts that would be needed to equate the two protocols.